Retirement Calculator

It depends almost entirely on what you spend, not what you earn. As a rough guide, a household spending ₹50,000 a month today and retiring in 30 years needs a corpus in the range of ₹8 to ₹12 crore, because 6% inflation turns that ₹50,000 into roughly ₹2.9 lakh a month by then. Use the calculator above with your own spending rather than a rule of thumb.

Two compounding effects stack. Inflation raises your monthly cost every year until you retire, and then keeps raising it for the whole of retirement. A 30-year working life followed by a 30-year retirement means inflation acts on your expenses for 60 years, not 30.

Lower than before it. Most planners move the corpus toward debt and hybrid funds at retirement, so 7% to 9% is a common assumption against 11% to 13% during accumulation. What matters is the real return: a pot earning 8% while prices rise 6% is only growing at about 1.9% in purchasing-power terms.

The 4% rule says you can withdraw 4% of your corpus in year one and raise it with inflation thereafter. It was derived from US market and inflation history. Indian inflation has typically run higher, so a more conservative 3% to 3.5% starting withdrawal is the safer planning assumption, which is broadly what this calculator produces when you price the corpus off the real return.

Put their current combined balance into 'Already saved for retirement' and the calculator grows it forward at your pre-retirement return, then sizes the monthly investment to cover only the remaining gap. Treat NPS carefully: a portion must be annuitised at maturity, so not all of it is freely spendable.

That depends on far more than the size of the pot, which is why this page draws the corpus across the whole plan rather than stopping at a single number. Put the monthly amount you can genuinely manage into the chart above and it will show the year the money runs out, if it does. The shape usually surprises people: the corpus normally keeps growing through the first decade of retirement, because returns still outrun withdrawals, and only then turns over. The years after that turn are the ones a plan lives or dies on.

As a rough guide, a corpus of 25 times your annual spending has historically funded about 30 years of withdrawals, which is where the 4% rule comes from. It assumes a long retirement, a diversified portfolio and no large one-off costs, and Indian inflation has generally run higher than the data behind that rule. Treat 25 times as a floor rather than a target, and use the chart above with your own inflation assumption instead of a rule of thumb.

Then one of the other inputs has to move, and the calculator shows you which lever is cheapest. Retiring two years later usually reduces the required monthly figure more than any plausible increase in return does, because it adds contributing years and removes spending years at the same time.